Equinox. I make it out onto the porch just as the sun peeks over the ridge. Phoebes are calling. From the top of a walnut tree, the brown-headed cowbird’s liquid lisp.
phoebe
Mackerel sky like a wrinkled brow. The spring is still singing about the last rain. The phoebe who called at sunrise flicks his tail.
A knife-thin moon fades into the dawn sky. The only cloud huddles in the bottom corner of the meadow, where a phoebe is calling.
Clear and still, with dew dripping off the roof and a pair of phoebes yelling “Phoebe!” at each other. Twenty-four years ago, the sky was just this clear.
Rain starts at sunrise and tapers off a half hour later. In its wake: phoebe, pewee, goldfinch, Carolina wren. A cedar waxwing’s whistle.
In the cool stillness, the snap of a phoebe’s bill on some unwary insect. The four-foot-tall aspen beside the driveway bends under the bird’s weight as he perches on its spindly tip.
The plaintive cries of what sounds like a fledgling crow up in the woods accompany the awkward sorties of a fledgling phoebe, beak snapping on a missed insect. Blue sky appears.
Cool and humid. A phoebe dives for an insect and gives it to a fledgling sitting on a walnut branch. In the shadows of the trees, white masses of mountain laurel blossoms.
Overcast and cold. A phoebe hawking insects from the lilac does far less flying than sitting, tail bobbing with what probably only looks like impatience.
Sunrise somewhere between showers, cold and sodden, the sky flat-white like the eye of a dead fish. No flies for the flycatchers, no sun for the wren.
A freakishly warm wind seasoned with rain. A red squirrel’s scold-call launches the dawn chorus: phoebe, wren, cardinal, white-throated sparrow. A turkey gobbles.
Dawn. A last glimpse of the moon through the clouds as the torrent of robin song is joined by a cardinal, a phoebe, the wren.
Thin, high clouds—enough to blur the edges of shadows. Whenever the robin pauses for breath, I can hear a phoebe calling up by the barn. Spring is here.
Breezy and cool at dawn. Migrants trade notes as they explore the forest edge: towhee, phoebe, thrush. A lost passenger jet comes roaring overhead.